Fractured Metropolis—Big/Small, Black/White Government in Postwar Atlanta

In 1950, Atlanta had just over 500,000 residents, located primarily within the city limits. Today the population is over 4.2 million, with less than 10% living within the city. In the suburbs and exurbs, the 10 counties and 68 municipalities of the Atlanta Regional Planning Area provide government services in a functionally balkanized metropolis. How this came to be is a story of the interplay of racial and local politics.
In the post-war years, Mayor William Hartsfield played a critical role in Atlanta’s expansion through the annexation of expanding suburbs. His Plan of Improvement expanded the city limits in 1952 and set up a process for the city to annex additional newly developed subdivisions in short order. To protect infrastructure and services, the Plan allowed the county to contract with the city to provide urban services in these subdivisions.

Hartsfield did not anticipate, however, the downsides of providing urban services to these districts, including the need to use a fragile water supply as a means of unifying the expanding metropolitan region. Consequently, anti-Atlanta sentiment among white suburbanites grew at the same time as African Americans were consolidating political power in the city center. Unsurprisingly, attempts to expand the city limits in the quarter of a century after the Plan of Improvement failed and county after county began to directly provide urban services to its constituents and to seek political autonomy in other ways as well.

This spurred a “cityhood movement” within the region. Residents of the wealthier predominantly white suburbs to the north pushed city incorporation measures so that their small communities could retain tax dollars and make decisions about planning and zoning at a hyper-local level. This paper considers the factors that fractured the metropolis and the circumstances that led voters to seek separate cityhood as a viable solution.